Director Michel Gondry is at the Chicago Four Seasons along with writer Charlie Kaufman, discussing their bold new creative endeavor, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
"It's like in music. You can invent a new melody and it might be interesting but it sounds like nothing. It's a fine balance. Personally, I like to try different things and be creative every time, but sometimes we are reminded that people won't understand and so we have to go back, which is an interesting process."
"It's a conversation we have all the time," says Kaufman, "Where do we lose meaning? It's hard to know."
In their respective careers, Kaufman and Gondry have defined themselves with a willfully defiant drive to undertake staggering narrative and conceptual risks, to continually push the bounds of meaning.
Jim Carrey with director Michel Gondry
In Gondry's case, the medium has primarily been music video, where he's been wildly successful based on an unparalleled sense of ingenuity. Take a peek at the recently released Palm Pictures' Directors Series DVD, for example, and you'll find a treasure trove of visionary creative work.
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Gondry's Directors Series DVD also features a decidedly strange short film with Jim Carrey driving around a bed on wheels, singing Elvis Presley's "Pecan Pie."
He drives the bed car to a gas station, gets a fill up and his pillows fluffed, and keeps on driving, clad only in his PJ's.
The Work of Director Michel Gondry
(Palm Pictures)
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The White Stripes Lego-based video for Fell in Love With a Girl? Gondry's.
The Björk video for Human Behavior? The one with the unintentionally frightening bear? Gondry's.
Daft Punk's gratingly infectious dancing mummy video for Around the World?
Well, you get the point.
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Everyone from the Rolling Stones to Beck have leaned on the director's childlike imagination and inventor's heart to create some of MTV-land's most uncommonly beautiful videos.
Then there's Kaufman, who clearly stands out as one of Hollywood's most talented and unconventional wordsmiths, having made a mark on the pop culture landscape with the manically conceived "Being John Malkovich" and the equally demanding Academy Award winning "Adaptation." His work is marked with a self-conscious sense of irony and a refreshingly peculiar sense of humor.
The two worked together for the first time in 2002 with "Human Nature," an uneven comedy starring Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette and Rhys Ifans. The film had a poor showing at the box office and was roundly panned by critics, but included some genuinely funny moments involving jungle sex and the troubles of a hairy woman.
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," the pair's latest film, delves into deeper and darker (though no less absurd) waters. The idea for the film – a story about a man who voluntarily erases the memory of another person from his mind - was Gondry's, based on a suggestion from friend Pierre Bismuth.
"Before I started with Charlie, I spoke with some producers and writers about this idea and it was always about having some secret that had been erased and having somebody trying to kill him, but I was like, 'no, this isn't how I want to do this.'
I want to do something human, something poetic, to explore a person's life. To me it's more fascinating that you can be attracted to a person and then not be attracted to them in one period of time."
Under Kaufman's deft hand, the film developed into a sometimes funny, often heartbreaking story about Joel (Jim Carrey) a man who attempts to have the memory of a painful relationship with former girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) erased by the fine folks at Lacuna Inc., a clinic devoted to the removal of such memories through the use of a painless non-surgical procedure.
The move towards realism pleased Gondry.
"I don't understand why most movies discuss things that we don't experience in real life. I've never faced a gun in my entire life.
I've seen one person dead and that was my father and I see so many dead people in movies. Just talking about the things that you experience in life can be so original."
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004: Kaufman, Gondry
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